Hey Guys!
I know there is always a lot going on during the summer but I'm hoping you'll find
time to come see this new show I'm working on with Susan Todd. -ShakesParody After
Dark.
Some of you know that my wife Donna Marie and I co-founded The Mickee Faust Club in
Tallahassee Florida.
We operate out of an old Warehouse in an Art Park called Railroad Square. We train people
in the community how to write and perform.
Every year -- for 30 years now-- we produce three cabarets of material written by the
people we've been training. There are a lot of people with disabilities in the
company-- all of them Crips with Attitude.
Every other summer we've put together a show called ShakesParody After Dark. The
title pretty much says it all. It's parodies of Shakespeare with a raunchy,
irreverent twist (not that Shakespeare doesn't have enough of those as it is, but--).
This summer Faust joined forces with Susan Gayle Todd at the Scottish Rite Theater to
bring some of the ShakesParody material here for her Austin based actors to perform.
Donna Marie and our Faust Company Manager, Jimmers McCallef and I are directing it.
In addition, we got some of the guys I know from Actual Lives Austin, the writing and
performance workshop for people with disabilities I co-founded 15 years ago.
It's a motley crew. And truthfully I wasn't sure how it was all going to
translate.
But these last few nights of rehearsals have settled my queasy stomach.
After watching Bob Jones, Robert Deike and David Sharpe (Winedale alumn Ernie Sharpe's
brother) rehearsing Redneck Shylock and bringing to (what could have been) short, comic
fluff some of the actual Shakespearean ambiguity and chill --I thought well hot damn.
The same when I watch Hollie, Susan Gayle Todd's daughter, rip into Ophelia's
Blues wailing, "I'm gonna drown my sorrows in sex."
Same watching Kristin Johnson, Taylor Flanagan and Kathy Blackbird shred the rap License
to Quill as Ophelia, Juliet and Lady McB.
There's more. And yeah, some of it is plain silly-- Shakespeare's Death Pit, Green
Eggs and Hamlet that kind of stuff.
But the material is always what you make it.
And it is going to be an amazing show.
The reason I'm telling you this?
The Mickee Faust Club owes its essence to Winedale.
When I moved to Tallahassee I was so damn bored and hated the kind of community theater
being done there which was like community theater being done everywhere-- more business
than fun, caught up in doing Broadway re-treads and too often just plain dismal.
Faust became Winedale in proxy -- a collaborative, frolicking approach to play and
language and making friends and all those things we love about Winedale. Including the
love of imperfection. Or at least, that was the idea.
This ShakesParody has that same kind of unbridled energy.
Come see it if you are around. There is a big handful of Winedale ex's in this mix.
The show is bawdy, sometimes downright dirty and the opening number features kind of group
strip tease -- but nothing Shakespeare wouldn't have laughed at.
Love to you all!
Terry